According to our friends at the U.S. Campaign for Palestinian Rights, “[m]embers of Congress and their staff need to hear from these panelists who will relate how ‘persistent human rights violations, systemic impunity, discrimination, and a hyper-militarized environment affect the lives of the Palestinian children growing up under a military occupation with no end in sight.'”

This year is a commemoration of 50 years of Israel’s illegal military occupation of the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, Jerusalem, the Syrian Golan Heights, the Egyptian Sinai Peninsula, and the Lebanese Shebaa Farms; 70 years of the Partition Plan of November 29th, 1947, when the UN gave 56% of historical Palestine to the manufactured state of “Israel,” even though European, zionist Jews there owned only 6% of the land; and 100 years of the Balfour Declaration, when the British imperialists first initiated their plan to colonize Palestine with European Jews.

The Balfour Declaration and the Partition Plan led directly to the Nakba, “catastrophe” in Arabic, when 750,000 Palestinians were expelled from their homes between 1947 and 1949. These refugees and their descendants now number over 5 million people, the largest refugee population in the world. And even though the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, international law, and specifically, UN General Assembly Resolution 194, guarantee the Right of Return for all Palestinian refugees and their descendants, Israel and Western powers, especially the U.S., have consistently denied our people this right.

Today is an important one in the history of the Palestinian people, but the Palestine National Movement has never considered only the 1967 territories (West Bank, Gaza Strip, and Jerusalem) to be occupied.

The entirety of historical Palestine is occupied; Israel has no right to exist as a white-settler, colonialist state exclusively for Jews; and a just peace will never be achieved unless and until the conflict is called what it truly is–the legitimate struggle of a colonized people against a colonialist project that had the full backing and support of British imperialism then, and is supported unequivocally by U.S. imperialism now.

In short, our fight is not a fight for an independent state on less than 1/4 of historical Palestine, regardless of what the comprador Palestinian Authority claims. Our incredibly brave Palestinian political prisoners, who recently launched an open ended hunger strike and won a battle with Israel for their rights, were not striking only for better treatment in Israeli dungeons. Our people and supporters across the world are not launching and winning Boycott Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaigns only to win human rights for Palestinians in the West Bank, Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip.

This struggle is a struggle for the comprehensive national rights of the Palestinian people–full independence, self-determination, the Right of Return, and the end of colonization of all of historical Palestine. We focus on the 1967 territories today, but we always continue organizing for Liberation and Return, and freedom for all our people on all of our land!